The 305 Greatest Books - #195: Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac. The book can be found on the Norwegian Book List.

When I first started to look for my next book to read, I had several of the Everyman bindings ready at my disposal. So I researched a bunch of them and Old Goriot was one of the shorter ones, so I picked it for this month. Mainly the comments I had seen online were that Balzac had a way with scene descriptions. He would often go for pages describing one particular aspect of a scene. And I had found that, for the most part, that was true. The beginning of this book is an ad nauseam set up for the building in which Goriot lived. And while it took me a little bit to get into this style of writing, eventually it won me over. I still needed to take it slow through the book though. I only ended up being able to handle about 10 pages a day, because it took some concentration to absorb the story; a story that is a little bit all over the place. At one point a major character turns out to be criminal living under an assumed name. Why was this in the story? I don't know. Did it have major implications for the story. Kind of, but not really. The ending also left me pretty sour on the whole thing. It made it feel that several of the threads in the story were not only loose, but just left dangling because they were unimportant. Generally though, the story focuses on Goriot and his two adult daughters, whom he basically purchased into well placed marriages at the expense of his own well being, putting himself into poverty. Were the daughters thankful? Maybe? I'm still not certain their true feelings, however the book does paint them generally into a bad light. By the end of the book, everything is depressing and I don't really like any of the characters. Our main character, Eugène being the exception. His character went from one who I could have accepted if he got run over by a train to being the only redeemable character by the end. And even his last act throws all that out the window. So, overall, I'm lukewarm to meh on it as a whole. It is likely on the list for the use of descriptions and not likely for the riveting plot.